Raise The Minimum Wage

What's to be done about raising the minimum wage? For too long that question has locked business and labor in fierce combat and left millions of Americans impoverished.

This week the Senate has an opportunity -- responsibility might be a better word -- to stop the wrangling and help raise the minimum pay rate to a humane level.

Five million Americans are laboring for the present minimum of $3.35 an hour, unchanged since 1981. It pays a full-time worker only $6,968 a year. That's below the poverty line of $7,397 for a family of two and far below the line for larger families.

What's under way in the Senate is a debate over a measure pushed for months by Sen. Edward Kennedy -- and salvaged at the last minute by both parties' election-year maneuvering. It would raise the minimum wage in 40-cent annual increments to $4.55 by 1991.

That's hardly excessive. Much of it would go to make up for inflation. The $3.35 hourly wage of 1981, for example, has eroded to $2.60 in terms of buying power.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and allied opponents find any minimum wage increase frightening. They charge it would wipe out hundreds of thousands of lower-level jobs because employers could no longer afford them.

The opposition also professes to worry that job losses would be most severe for minorities, teen-agers and -- among adults -- the least able and least educated.

Leaving the probable excess of the estimate aside, these are tiresome prophesies borrowed from opposition to all previous increases in the minimum wage. The need for decent pay is no less for these groups than for anyone else, and over time the increases would be more significant than the early job losses.

After working its way through several fights over amendments, the Senate probably will vote on the Kennedy plan before week's end. The rest will be up to the House -- where the plan's chances look good -- and the president. The nation's low-income workers deserve some good news on the income front, and soon.